


His Own Absence

by Xaidread



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Embedded Video, Gen, Podfic Available, Podfic Length: 0-10 Minutes, Pre-Canon, Video Format: MP4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-03
Updated: 2018-05-05
Packaged: 2019-05-01 11:43:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14519790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xaidread/pseuds/Xaidread
Summary: They wrote his name in blood and did not know it: how cultists created the Outsider.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Listen to the podfic version embedded in chapter 2!

The ritual wright dipped the knife into the hollow of his throat, and from the fresh gap she withdrew a well of black anguish that clung on the tines. The boy gurgled and gave out bubbles of blood between feeble gasps as ancient metal slid out and the chill of the Void seeped in.

When she punctured his neck, in the spray she wrote with an untrained hand the name given and snatched away by the boy's gravebound mother. The gore made a splattered swirl on Void rock, a shape like a jagged harpoon crater constituted in fish hooks. Neither anyone from the assembly nor the sacrifice himself could ever read it, caught as they were in a fossilizing timelessness.

"In a street rat's blood, I've watered the stock of a new age," the wright declared. Then in one twist she pivoted to sling the excess from the twin blades onto the blighted tree beside her, darkly painting brittle bark. "From one little life, we've built for the world a bulwark against the hungering Void's appetite, threw off its claws from lesser mortal minds, shut the valve on the wellspring of magic."

Although she spoke over the boy's head, he could scarcely make out her words through sludgy exsanguination, never mind the distant tongue of that cabal present to witness one urchin perishing for unfamiliar purposes. It would hurt worse than his current condition to lift his head and see the crowd's reaction towards its ringmaster's closing remarks, so he stirred not at all but set his sights toward the endless un-sea, un-sky.

"In time, chaos will coalesce into order. But after that, who is to know how long stasis may be maintained?"

There are no true stars here, but a strange trick of light lets distant pillars drifting within the horizon of his gaze catch glimmers on their planes, even as a darkness passes through his eyes in bruising reds and impossibly deep violet-green pulsing. But there's a form approaching from his lower-right periphery. If he guides his focus around it—there, a shape with protrusions—it's the shadow of a whale as it rises from the depths, or is it sounding towards them? Will its weight and the column of pressure at its back crush them all flat?

"Our part, at least, is finished, and humankind no longer needs us. But remember this for the rest of our days: ideas are undying. Knowledge of things beyond the veil will resurface, somehow; it happened just so, when the stars guided our preceptors to the Old God, and with its aid we've now made the New."

The remote leviathan looming beyond the boy's direct vision gave a mournful call and then receded into its own shadow. For a long moment, he knew his own absence. The sound lingered in the marrow of his bones, interrupted by no beat from his stilled heart. This was a sensation he wanted to hold onto, a shared secret to sustain him through the grip of death. He feels a primal response welling up from the Void within.

At that, the Outsider rises from the altar. He tears out an inhuman scream from his ruined throat, a cry of complete pain that ruptures the sympathetic attunement of the cultists' stolen perception. With one hand, the Outsider seizes the knife from the wright and slams her head into the altar's imperfect edge with the other. Stone cuts into her borrowed eye, shatters on impact, binds to the wright's flesh. He hurls the knife into the vacuum, not noticing how it rips through worlds in its careening flight. The tree nearby explodes in chips and splinters at its passing, chunks of wood through its middle being drawn into a blue brightness that pierced through the surrounding gloom.

With a mantle smoking like blood spilled in deep waters, he reflexively covered his face against the unexpected radiance. In a stumble his feet found the edge of the island, another step gained the space beyond the precipice—and then he gave himself to the drop to get as far as he could from the cultists, from their collective madness, from his helpless flesh-body frozen in time. The Void heeded his will, enfolding him in a murky embrace as he plummeted through boundless nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The seed of this work was inspired by cyberpigeon-remade's [meta on the twin-bladed knife](https://cyberpigeon-remade.tumblr.com/post/169672345129/the-twin-bladed-knife-and-its-relationship-with) on tumblr and by Martin's last speech in high chaos: "Here to add me to your list? To write my name across the ground in blood?"


	2. [auto-podfic edition]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Video length: 5m36s


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